The Legionnaires

Twenty children huddled in a corner.

“We’re the Legion, Grandmother,” Toly said to me, “not a damn orphanage. This is a military post.”

“What else was there to do?” I asked. “Tell those things to go away until we can ship the children off planet? This was going to be a resort posting, five-star.”

When we initially landed in the Lavigne system all of us had been giddy. Who wouldn’t be? It was the first world with optimal conditions: the perfect climate, the perfect star type, and a soil chemistry almost identical to that of the south of France, just right to reestablish vineyards. A dream assignment. Nobody wanted Nimes Lointain again, the Legion’s training planet, the ideal place if you enjoyed marching all day with a full kit under two g’s. We had just come from Nimes; Lavigne was supposed to have been our vacation.

“How do they see?” I whispered. Out the firing port we could see an ocean of them, mante religieuse (French for praying mantis), huge insect-like things that had shown up that morning and slaughtered every single colonist—except for the kids in our bunker.

“Once they get closer,” said Toly, “I’ll arm the bots.”

Someone coughed on the other side of the room. “Leave it to miners to find killer bugs instead of metals. We always have bad luck with lousy miners.”

“Three hundred meters,” said Toly, ignoring her. “Coms get a response from orbital yet?”

I checked the transmission log. “No.”

One of the other girls dropped her carbine and curled into a ball, mumbling, “I want to go back to Nimes Lointain. I want to go home.”

That’s how bad it had gotten. Basic training had just become preferable to Lavigne.

The first drop of rain smacked my helmet, reminding me how far from Earth I had traveled. The second and third didn’t register. Soon water fell in sheets and, while standing in formation with the other recruits, I watched the parade ground turn from dust to a gluey mess, into which you sank at the slightest movement. We weren’t supposed to move.

A corporal stepped in front of me, taking a moment to access my suit’s transponder. “Rebecca Matthews. A mother?” he asked.

“I was.”

“But you have children, no?” I heard the confusion in his voice. The corporal spoke softly, his voice tickling my ears through helmet speakers, and its gentleness surprised me since I had expected to be yelled at from this point on. The other thing I had expected? French. Only he spoke in English, with almost no accent.

“I had three,” I said.

“But then…who is taking care of them?”

“They and my husband died. Car accident.”

“I understand.” A mirrored visor hid his face. Ours weren’t mirrored and we had been instructed to keep interior lights on at all times, so the instructors could watch the occupants. I saw myself, a squat armored figure in orange ceramic, reflected in the corporal’s visor while water poured off my shoulders in twin waterfalls.

“But you’re thirty-five,” he added, obviously troubled by something.

“That’s correct.”

The corporal broke the silence ten seconds later with a sigh. “In less than a minute I will give the volunteers another chance to leave. Anyone who wants it will be given passage back to Earth and a flight home. A widow at age thirty-five should consider this opportunity and take it. You are too old, too misguided, and too much a risk. This is a mistake.”

And he was gone. You weren’t supposed to look at him and had to stare straight ahead, so as soon as he moved away the corporal exited my field of view and left me to my thoughts—which he had just thrown out of whack. What was I doing there? Back in France it had seemed so clear, even when they first interrogated me, trying everything they could to figure out what would make a middle-aged mother want to join. I had given them the usual answers—duty, honor, Legion esprit de corps—but it wasn’t the truth. Even I didn’t understand the truth. It had more to do with an intangible instinct that had kept me up at night ever since I had seen the recruiting ad and started doing research, an inner voice that whispered go to France, enlist, finally do something that nobody expected, something important. Before you kill yourself.

My mother and the corporal would have gotten along instantly; she had cried for a straight week after I told her of my plans, and was crying when she dropped me off for the flight to Paris. I don’t even remember the plane ride. Three months later I found myself on Nimes Lointain, fitted for my training suit and herded onto the parade ground under a gravity twice that of Earth’s while sweat from the strain of standing made my forehead clammy.

The corporal’s voice clicked onto the general frequency. “Garde-à-vous.” Those of us who knew no French had been given lessons during our voyage, and it took a moment to realize that I understood without thinking, my heels squishing together. Apparently we didn’t come to attention quickly enough.

“Garde-à-vous!” This time we moved simultaneously, and I willed my gauntlet’s thumb into the correct position, just behind the suit’s main thigh plate. The corporal stepped carefully onto a raised platform. “I am disgusted by all of you. The Legion wants women in its ranks. So, fine. We take women. You represent the ten percent of female humanity who volunteered and met the minimum requirements to even have a chance of making it through basic training.”

He held a stack of soggy papers up in one hand, over his head. “You signed yourself to us for five years, but from what I see none of you will last five days. Anyone who wants to leave now may do so. It will be your last chance. For the next four months this planet will do its best to crush you under its gravity, making every exercise, every movement excruciating. We can afford to lose all of you. Any injured personnel this unit incurs while away from camp will be given low priority for our medical and rescue staff, which is currently dedicated to supporting mining operations. Rocks have value, and you do not. Our miners are priceless. If you cannot return to camp on your own, you will be left where you fall. None of your section mates will have the strength to carry another body, and since vehicles are reserved for mining operations there will be only one option.”

A red light blinked on my forearm controls and a second later the message flashed on my heads-up: new data had been loaded into my suit computer.

“Self-destruction. All volunteers have the option to administer a lethal dose of combat drugs in the event that they become incapacitated, and the instructions have just been uploaded to your systems. Now look behind me.”

I did. According to the suit it was midday, and somewhere far above us Nimes’s star shone, but almost none of its light penetrated the cloud cover, so blackness hid the plains beyond our corporal. An occasional flash of lightning illuminated a distant communications tower.

“Your first exercise is to run to that tower and back. I say run, but what I mean is to move at your fastest possible speed and return before mess at 1600 hours. Anyone who misses the time will be discharged. Be advised that when it rains like this, the volcanic dust absorbs water like a sponge, which creates a quicksand condition in some areas that will suck you under in less than a minute. Some will not return.”

The corporal waved the sheets of paper again. “So who wants out right now?”

A few women broke ranks and the corporal told them to return to the barracks. The rest of us waited.

“I have only pity for you who stay,” he said. “Four hours to complete the task. Move out.”

One second I was standing there, the next I found myself in the middle of a group of women struggling against Nimes’s gravity. Each step was more difficult than the last. The mud made loud sucking sounds as we pulled one foot out, then the other, and I soon felt as though the planet were alive, doing its best to grab hold. Before long a group of women, the faster ones, had pulled ahead and distanced themselves, leaving me in the middle of a long orange line, alone. How appropriate, I thought. None of us had had time to talk, and while the rain poured over my helmet I struggled not only against the gravity and the mud, but also against the realization that if anything happened to me there would be no rescue. There were no friends here, and my home was light-years away. I wasn’t just alone; it was as if I had never existed. Insignificant.

I saw a commotion ahead of me. The lightning gave momentary glimpses of our destination so that every few seconds we could check to make sure we were on course. In the next flash I saw a group of women—the ones who had moved ahead—clustered, looking at something. By the time I got there several had broken off and moved to the side, and it took a few minutes for me to get close enough to see why they had changed direction.

Three women stood thigh-high in mud, sinking fast. I couldn’t hear anything over the rain until I switched on the radio.

“Help me!”

A girl next to me turned. “Any ideas?”

“No.” I stood for a moment, watching as they sank farther, and then moved to follow the others.

“Aren’t you going to help them?” the girl called after me.

“Why? They’re done.”

“Asshole,” she muttered.

I didn’t even think of responding—exhaustion, that had to be it. At first it disgusted me, that I had just left three women to die without trying to help, but the fight against Nimes’s gravity, and the effort to just lift my feet from the mud and slap them down, had drained me of everything. Even feelings. I knew there wouldn’t be any way to help, that the corporal had been right, because in this place you barely managed to help yourself. Sweat streamed down my face now, and the suit’s internal temperature indicator climbed, its numbers shifting from green (nominal) to yellow (struggling, but still OK).

The other thing that vanished was a sense of time. One minute the chronometer froze and the tower stood there as if it would never get any closer, and a couple of times I had a sensation as though my feet were sliding in place, not actually moving forward. Or time flew. I’d glance at the clock, think about something else, and then look back to find that twenty minutes had elapsed when I swore it had just been a second. By the time I reached the tower I had passed at least fifteen more girls captured by the planet’s mud, and decided to switch off communications altogether.

Two hours to make it back. It was easier on the return. Maybe there was a gentle downslope—imperceptible to the eye—or it might have been that the base lights winked in the distance, a reminder that whether or not you made the time it would all be over soon. The patches to avoid were obvious now. Some still had helmets sticking out, orange warning beacons. Even without the reminders our boots had carved a path that hadn’t yet filled in with mud so I didn’t have to be as careful where I put my feet. The chronometer had fogged over by the time I stumbled back onto the parade ground, and it took a moment to figure out how to wipe it with my chin.

Two minutes to spare. The corporal waited with us, and as soon as the four-hour mark hit he screamed at the remainder of the women who straggled in, many of whom crawled for the last few hundred meters. They didn’t even get to enter the base. A shuttle waited with its hatch open, and the women had to remove their suits, stack them neatly by the gate, and then run, naked, into the craft. By the time it was done those of us on the field barely stood, fatigue threatening to finally claim us as the corporal walked between our ranks.

He stopped in front of me, and I thought I heard surprise in his voice. “They gave you a new name when you signed up. Marianne. Do you know the significance of this name?”

“It was my grandmother’s, corporal.”

“It’s more than that. This is a very important name to the French, a symbol of liberty and reason. It’s a very good name.” He strode through the mud and back onto his podium, addressing the smaller group that now faced him. “Twenty. We started with one hundred fifty, and now we have twenty. At the end there will probably only be ten. Stow your suits, bathe, and get some sleep. Your first day of training begins tomorrow.”

I barely made it to the barracks, out of my suit, and onto my rack before passing out.

The mantes came for us after nightfall.

“Bots activated,” said Toly.

I peered out of my firing port and watched as the slope in front of me filled with greenish-white tracers, crisscrossing in overlapping fields of fire. It looked beautiful. Occasional grenade blasts overloaded my night vision, making me blink until I could see again, mantes dancing in the field, noiselessly. I sensed their surprise, as if the colonists had been easy pickings but this, their first real fight, scared the crap out of them. Some skittered toward us on twelve legs, then ten, then seven, and finally collapsed to the ground when they couldn’t propel themselves forward. Others lowered themselves and advanced as far as possible behind their friends’ bodies until they broke into the open. Those got it too, in the end. After a few minutes an eerie screech sounded over the battlefield, making me wish I could cover my ears, and the things slunk back into the darkness.

Toly punched the keys on her forearm controls. “Sentries at half ammo. We can withstand another assault before they break through.”

“There’s always the minefield,” someone said.

“You’re an idiot.”

I thought hard as Toly worked things out and wondered what Buttons, the section leader, would have done. As luck would have it she had been called to the orbital station with our lieutenant the day before the attack and it hurt—not that we didn’t like Toly. But Buttons wasn’t just a Legionnaire, she always had the answers, and to not have her felt like trying to fight with one hand tied. Toly, I decided finally, might not be ready for this.

One of the children crept over to me. “Are you winning?” he asked.

“Yes.” I picked him up, trying to place him on my lap, but the ceramic armor was slick and he slid to the floor. “We’re winning, don’t worry about a thing.”

“You aren’t French,” he said. “What are you?”

“I’m American. Toly over there is Russian. In fact most of us are Russian but there are a few Americans, some British, Chinese, and my friend Buttons, if she were here, well she’s French.”

“I’m going to be a Legionnaire when I grow up.”

I wanted to cry. Except for the fact that we were speaking French, he reminded me of my son, all innocence and totally clueless—in a kid kind of way. The thought occurred to me that it was highly unlikely he or any of us would make it out, that he wouldn’t get a chance to grow up, but I told him something different. “Well then, think of this as your first lesson. Watch us. Learn from what we do. Your Legion training starts right now.”

When the corporal said “training” he must have meant something else. Slavery maybe. Servitude. We never touched a weapon, didn’t study two hundred ways to kill with a spoon, didn’t even spend one minute marching; the corporal explained that before a Legionnaire learned to destroy, she had to build. So our group spent the first week constructing a new storage facility for the base armored personnel carriers. We woke, barely, from our first reveille and lined up, after which the corporal interviewed us to find out if we had any construction experience. I didn’t. As a result he assigned me to the general labor pool, something that I would have done better to avoid.

Obey without question—the earliest lesson, taught in a way that one never forgot. What happened that first morning may have resulted from my stupidity, but you have to cut me some slack because I didn’t have any way of knowing. And I can’t describe the kind of fatigue that Nimes induced. We wilted under its gravity, sweating in half suits (we had been allowed to take off our helmets while working), and the shovel felt heavier than lead. I figured it was crazy. The Legion had plenty of engineering equipment, and who the hell dug a two-story underground facility with shovels? Every load of dirt caused a minor avalanche that filled my hole almost immediately so that progress, if you called it that, was a three-steps-forward-two-steps-back kind of thing.

When the corporal passed me I stiffened to attention and cleared my throat. “Corporal, why are we doing this by hand? Shouldn’t we be using equipment of some kind?”

He smiled. I knew it wasn’t a friendly smile, more like the kind you’d get from someone who had been waiting all morning for one of us to ask that exact question, and he poked the brim of his white kepi into my nose. During construction the NCOs wore traditional uniforms, not combat suits.

“Have you been in combat?”

“No, Corporal.”

“Do you think that where we send you, you’ll always have engineering equipment when it comes time to build fortifications? That you’ll have robots?”

“No, Corporal.”

“Then button up.” He waited for me to lock my helmet on before continuing, and gestured at my shovel. “Raise your shovel over your head. Both hands.”

I lifted it high and felt my muscles quiver under its weight. Even in one g it would have been hard enough—not at first, but as the seconds ticked by I knew that it wouldn’t be long until I’d have major trouble.

“Hold until relieved.” The corporal turned to the rest of the group and shouted, “The Legion takes care of itself, and even when we have nothing, we can make anything. Never question.”

And he left again.

It didn’t take long before it felt as though I would pass out, probably only half an hour. The occasional trembling in my arms became a steady tremor and then spasms. My back ached. After an hour I heard the blood pounding in my ears, and my breaths came so rapidly that they made me dizzy, turning each minute into a guessing game of will-I-last-to-the-next. I don’t even remember passing out. The next thing I knew the corporal had dragged me to my feet and begun swinging a wooden baton against the side of my helmet so that my ears rang and I barely heard his screaming, only just comprehending that now, in addition to holding the shovel overhead, I was to jog-shuffle around the perimeter.

The rest of the day passed in a blur. I lost track of the number of times I passed out, but every time the corporal revived me to continue the punishment, each stage becoming more and more harsh with only minor breaks to stay hydrated. It ended at dinnertime. I had expected to get a chance to talk to someone in the mess hall, finally meet some of my unit mates, but as it turned out I could barely keep my head from the table, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Nobody was allowed to talk.

By the time morning came we were exhausted from fear. Most of the children still slept, had passed out some time after midnight, but nobody in our unit wanted to take a chance on resting. I had just decided to close my eyes when Toly’s voice forced them open.

“Movement.”

“What in God’s name is it doing?” someone asked.

A lone mante approached the perimeter. Our bunker was a typical Legion advance base, built into the ridgeline of mountains that overlooked the settlement, and with three underground stories about two to three hundred meters below us. We could see the settlement—a bunch of Quonset huts that had been torn apart. The day before it had crawled with mantes, and they had tossed human corpses all over the place as they rampaged through the prefab houses, splitting them open with their forelegs. The only reason the kids had made it to safety was that they were on a hike with their teacher, who dropped them off on her way to try to save her husband. She never made it back.

The mante advanced toward our line of sentry bots, squat metallic turrets that rose a meter from the ground. Toly had her finger over their arming button.

“Hit it, Toly,” I said.

“No.”

“Why?”

“It’s not attacking. Maybe it came to talk since we gave them such a beating last night. We have to buy as much time as we can until we figure out why we can’t get through to orbital. And we need to save our ammunition.”

“Maybe it wants to surrender,” someone suggested.

I shook my head. “Or a duel to the death.”

We watched for a while longer. It skittered closer to the line and stopped, waving what looked like a pair of long antennae over the closest bot, and for a moment I thought that my helmet amplifiers picked up a strange clicking noise.

“I think it’s in love,” I said, and got a few chuckles.

Toly stood. “I’m going out there.”

“You’re crazy.”

Her boot slammed into my faceplate so that my head snapped back, cracking against the concrete wall. Before I could react she pressed her helmet against mine.

“Don’t question me ever again, Grandmother.”

Toly pulled herself up the ladder and left through the tight ceiling hatch before dropping with a thud in front of the bunker. We waited. She moved hesitantly forward, her carbine pointed directly at the thing as she took one step after another, careful to avoid the mines that were marked on her heads-up display. When she got to within ten meters of the creature it froze and raised its forelegs to extend a pair of knifelike spikes.

“Maybe that’s its way of saying hello,” I said.

I was wrong. The thing leaped into the air and spun, so that the moment it landed its two spikes popped through the front of Toly’s armor and out the back, sending a pink spray into the air. It then let out a shriek and lifted her overhead, throwing the body fifty meters downslope.

The light blinked on in my helmet and it took me a moment to remember what it meant. “I have command.”

I flipped open the cover on my forearm controls and punched the arming button for the sentry bots, which then reduced the mante to a twitching mass of legs in under a second. Toly and I had a less-than-friendly history, but her death still hit me. Tears started welling in my eyes and I clenched my jaw, forcing them back and promising myself that there would be time later.

“Why did she do that?”

The boy from earlier had crept up to the firing port to watch, had seen the whole thing. I pulled him away. “Don’t do that again, kid, OK? What’s your name?”

“Phillip.”

“Phillip, promise me you’ll stay over there with the others and won’t sneak up to the ports anymore, OK?”

He nodded. “But why did she go out there? Why did she get mad when you tried to stop her?”

“Well…” It was a good question, and although I knew the answer, it wasn’t so easy to explain. “Toly was Russian. That’s how the Russians are, Phillip, just…really, really brave.”

And insane.

Although few of us had the time to talk to one another during the first week, the Russians in our group glommed together instantly, and it took me a while to realize it wasn’t because of instinct. It was a tattoo thing. Most of them were refugees, granddaughters of the survivors of the Second Subterrene War, when Chinese hit them unexpectedly from Manchuria and then kept rolling toward the Urals. They spoke Chinese in Moscow now. Anyone who survived the takeover had been ear-tattooed for identification before being shipped to the old gulags, which is where these ones must have lived before they escaped. It didn’t matter that it had been over for more than a century, or that it wasn’t the Americans who had conquered Russia, because it was almost as if the experience had imprinted a notion in Russian DNA: it was our fault. If the Americans hadn’t weakened their forces with the First Subterrene War, the Russians figured, they would have never lost later to the Chinese. I had known that there would be Russians in the Legion but hadn’t thought it would cause me any trouble—“We’re all on the same team,” that kind of crap. Right.

One day I returned to the barracks to find a Russian girl sitting on my bunk. She smiled and lay down. “You American?”

The room got quiet. A few of her friends watched from nearby, smiling as one of them whispered something.

I was too tired to be scared. “Get off my rack.”

“Your rack? No, you can sleep on the floor, we need this one for screwing.”

And the rest of them laughed. When I noticed the knife in her hand, I got a little scared, but the gravity had worn me down, made me feel as though if I didn’t get a chance to sleep I’d die anyway.

“Screw you.” Lifting my boot would have taken too much effort and been slow enough that she could have reacted, so instead I slammed my knee upward. Her head snapped back. The girl’s momentum took her toward the other side of my rack and I helped it, leaned down and shoved so that she flew in two g’s to slam onto the concrete floor with a grunt. It took me a second to sort through the confusion. For some reason there was blood, lots of it. The puddle under her grew slowly in a red amoeba shape until I finally noticed that the knife had somehow lodged itself in her throat. Her friends stared at her, shocked, and when one of them shouted at me you didn’t have to speak Russian to figure it out. They were going to kill me.

But before they moved the corporal arrived, and I trembled at attention as he stood over the body. “She fell on her own knife?” he asked me.

“Yes, Corporal.”

“Good. You’re acting platoon leader. The rest of you”—he raised his voice even though it wasn’t necessary, you really could have heard a pin drop it was so quiet—“will obey Volunteer Marianne. Her words are my words.”

The corporal approached the group of Russians—eight of them left now—and poked his kepi brim into one of their faces. It surprised me to hear him speak their language. Whatever he said it must have been bad, because they all went white before finally speaking in one voice. “Yes, Corporal.”

After he had gone, the remaining Russians followed him with their friend’s body, and I collapsed onto my rack. I had almost fallen asleep when a girl tapped my shoulder.

She extended her hand. “Jennifer Simpson.”

“Marianne.”

“I’m sorry.”

I shook my head, confused. “For what?”

“For calling you an asshole—the first day, during our tower run.”

“Oh.” I remembered then, and grinned.

“You were right, I didn’t get it then but I do now.”

“Get what?”

“We have to look out for ourselves in this place. Anyway, I’m sorry for calling you an asshole.”

She turned and walked to her bunk, lay down, and shut her eyes, leaving me to my thoughts. I couldn’t predict when they’d come to me—my family. Their faces appeared out of nowhere, my husband and children, and I watched in slow motion as my husband started to scream when the transport broke through the median barrier and headed straight for our car. He swerved, but instead of turning the car skidded on wet pavement and began to spin, just before the front wheels of the truck climbed over our hood and slammed into the windscreen. I would have avoided the accident if I had been driving, I was sure of it.

“You weren’t wrong,” I said, and she turned her head to face me.

“What?”

“You weren’t wrong. You American?”

She nodded. “DC. What do you mean I wasn’t wrong?”

I thought for a second. “If we don’t try to help each other, we’re animals, and who knows? Maybe that’s what these people want. But this is a strange place, and something tells me that we’ll need to stick together, whether we’re animals or not.”

My technical specialist thought she had the answer, and had called me down to the communications room. I tiptoed through the sleeping children. The ladder’s side rails slid through my fingers with a loud squeal until I landed heavily at the bottom, and I peeled off, heading for the coms shack. It felt good. To be deep underground and away from the mantes somehow made things seem better.

“Lucy,” I said over the radio. Lucy was still a bit young but a natural leader, and I’d chosen her as my second after Toly died. “I’ll be in coms, you have control of the bots until I get back.”

“Roger.”

There was barely room for two in the communications room and our specialist liked to wave her arms a lot, to punctuate her arguments, so I listened from the doorway.

“I’ve tried every frequency I can think of and we’re not getting through. Nothing. So last night I started reading the manual.”

“Wait a second,” I said. I had forgotten her name in all the excitement and had to check her tag. “Heidi, you’re our specialist and you’re only now reading the manual?”

“Look, it’s not my fault, I didn’t ask for the job and I haven’t been to coms school yet, that was supposed to happen after the regular army relieved us here. They assumed that since I’m German I must be good with a radio. Or something like that.”

“And you’re not.”

“And I’m not. I was in cosmetology school when one of my friends dared me to sign up, so I did, and, well, here I am. Look, Grandmother, you know it the same as me: nobody expected this to be a tough assignment or they would have sent someone else, not a brand new unit fresh out of basic.”

I knew she was right. If we’d been up in the bunker with the main group I’d have told her to shut up, but it was the truth. All of us were slotted for our next training billet but the Legion belonged to the regular army, and since women Legionnaires were relatively new someone had gotten the idea that a quick and easy assignment would be better than a training camp. It would give the Legion publicity—more recruits, that sort of crap.

“Just tell me what you’ve found.”

She pointed to the computers. “We’re being jammed. Those things are communicating over multiple frequencies, the same ones we use to transmit.”

“Or…” The antennae. None of us had seen their eyes, not even the smallest indication of them, and I wondered if they “saw” using something else. “Or they have something like radar. For seeing.”

“That might do it too.”

Lucy clicked into my headset and I saw the warning light blink at the same time. Sentry bots had been activated. “Grandmother?” she said.

“On my way.” Before turning I grabbed Heidi’s shoulder. “Can you get around it?”

“I think so, I just have to find a band that’s free. The good news is that orbital must know that something’s wrong, they must be trying to send us messages as well. Won’t they come investigate?”

“Maybe. But until we get in touch we can’t count on them, so get to work.”

After I started back up the ladder my muscles began cramping. Halfway to the top I had to rest, and leaned back against the circular framework designed to give you a chance if your grip on the ladder slipped. Only fifty meters to go, I thought, and suddenly felt my age.

Being thirty-five on Earth hadn’t been so bad. But at Nimes’s two g’s thirty-five seemed more like eighty. Every morning my muscles bunched into inextricable knots, and as soon as we began fitness training and military operations the corporal gave less and less time to sleep. It wore us down. Within days the planet turned us into walking corpses who had trouble recognizing reality, orders taking a few seconds to register through a fog of despair. We ran most of the mornings, barely able to raise our feet over the dust, learning in rain how to spot the suck-sand, the name the Legion gave to those pockets of liquefied dust.

Afternoons and evenings we spent in lectures learning the finer points of combat suit maintenance, small unit tactics, and how to properly crease our fatigues. Did you know that the Legion was the only service that didn’t use powered servos in their armor? Everyone else used them. We learned that during the massacre on Stephens-Eight, Chinese forces had deployed nanos—contrary to the universal ban, which they had refused to ratify—and that the bots had targeted all power sources, including suits. After that it was a turkey shoot. All those American and British forces, frozen in place because their servos wouldn’t budge, had no choice but to get naked in vacuum or wait for the enemy to advance, all the while knowing that the Chinese didn’t take prisoners. The only survivors were a Special Forces unit that had declined powered armor. They were Legion.

I also learned that Jennifer and I were the only Americans in our group. Amy Tipton was from London, and had joined the Legion after doing time for prostitution, thought it would be a good way to finally do something worth bragging about. And there was Juliette (I can’t remember her last name), a Canadian whose boyfriend regularly beat the crap out of her—so badly that the last time out of the hospital she hadn’t bothered going home, and had had a friend bring her passport to the airport. There were a few others whose names have faded entirely, but they could be distilled into a few types: the ones who were crazy, the ones who were running from something and had no place left to go, and the ones who thought the Legion would be a romantic getaway. There weren’t many in this last group. The first day had cured most girls of any notion that Nimes would be fun.

Then there were the Russians, a type unto themselves. Whatever the corporal had said to them (we also learned that he was originally from Russia) kept them from retaliating, but they maintained their distance and refused to listen to me. In fact, it was for this very reason that the corporal called me to his office one day, where I stood in the heat and waited for his acknowledgment. It was easier now. Standing. Three weeks in two g’s had finally whittled down my weight and built up muscles so that an uneasy equilibrium had developed.

Five minutes passed before he looked up. “You are failing.”

“I don’t understand, Corporal.”

“I’ve given you three weeks to take over the platoon, to demonstrate your leadership skills. And you’ve shown me nothing.”

I didn’t argue because I knew he was right. The Russians had undermined my efforts at every chance, despite the fact that whenever they failed—refused to prepare for inspections, showed up late for mess, or moved just a little too slowly during training—it brought them punishment.

“You have until the end of the day to change things. If you don’t, I’m putting one of the Russian girls in charge. Dismissed.” I began to turn when he looked up again. “One last thing. Have the platoon assemble on the parade ground in ten minutes, we’re doing something new today, something happened on one of our far outposts so we’ll have to accelerate the schedule.”

“Corporal?” I saw it then, that he was preoccupied and that his ashtray had filled with cigarette butts. He never smoked.

“We’re at war. Chinese forces attacked the Korean Colony on Koryo, where we have an outpost. Dismissed.”

War. Suddenly it was too much and as I strode back to the barracks I felt light-headed, overwhelmed by the thought that we were four weeks through basic already and in eight more we’d be one step closer to a real conflict. But what conflict? How had it all started? Clouds gathered and jagged lightning playing over Nimes’s volcanic peaks, making me wonder what it would be like. Real fighting. None of us had been in it before, and the closest thing we had experienced was in a movie theater. Except for the Russians. Whatever had happened to us in our past lives, they had seen the hardest times, would be the most prepared—mentally, anyway—for what waited. I needed them. The problem was that by the end of the day, I suspected that they would be in charge, because I had all but failed as their leader.

Word traveled fast. When I pushed into the barracks Jennifer looked up and the other girls fell silent.

“Is it true?” she asked. “War?”

I nodded. “That’s what they say. Suit up. We’re to report to the parade ground in nine minutes.”

Everyone started moving except for the Russians. Their new leader, a short stocky girl named Toly, grinned at me, her teeth yellowed by nicotine. She sat on her bunk with two others and played cards, ignoring the order I had just given. I sensed the tension in the air—knew something was about to happen—and for a moment I considered repeating the order, but then shook my head, thinking to hell with it. I leaped at Toly before she could react.

The impact shook my jaw. Toly flew from the bed and slammed onto the concrete as I struggled to stay on top, suspecting that she was the better fighter—had to be. Whom had I ever fought? But it didn’t matter on Nimes, the planet itself had taught us this lesson during our training sessions: in higher g’s, all you had to do was get on top and stay there, letting gravity do most of the work. Toly grunted. One of her fists swung at me from the side, so wide that I didn’t see it until the moment of impact. Someone told me later what happened. As soon as I got my bearings again and found that I was still on top, I screamed, and slammed my forehead down onto her nose, not just once but again and again until blood squirted from both nostrils. I kept doing it. Finally Toly stopped moving and Jennifer pulled me off. At first I expected Toly’s friends to come at me, to defend one of their own, but instead they smiled.

“You’re tougher than we thought,” one of them said, extending her hand. “Francine.”

“What the Christ?” asked Jennifer. She was just as confused as me; neither of us grasped what just happened.

“My mother was French, not Russian,” the girl explained, clearly misunderstanding the source of our confusion. “So…Francine.”

The others picked up Toly and splashed water on her face as I checked my watch. Five minutes left. Toly came to and barked an order at them in Russian, and even though I didn’t know what she said, it was obvious that they were getting ready.

“Not bad,” she said. “Maybe we’ll listen to you for a while.”

I shook my head. “I don’t get it.”

“It’s just our way, from the camps. We won’t follow a coward, and you got lucky when you killed our friend, it wasn’t a real test. Now we know that you can fight, and it’s OK. Five minutes, Grandmother?”

“Four,” I said, and then caught myself. “What’s this Grandmother crap?’

The Russians all giggled and it sent chills down my spine—to see the toughness reflected in their tattoos and scars, their nicotine stains, and then to hear a girlish giggle as if they were really just a bunch of teenagers. “It’s what we call you. We’ve never seen a soldier so old.”

At first I shook my head, wondering if I needed to nip this one in the bud, but there wasn’t time and I still had to get suited. We barely made it. Grandmother, I thought. Well, they could’ve called me worse things…

By the time I climbed up the ladder and into the bunker, the bots had run out of ammunition. The first mine went off, sending a tremor through the floor, and a flash of bright light filled the room with a yellow glow. It wasn’t long before the children were all screaming.

“All of you,” I shouted. “Quiet!” When they had settled down I continued, my words punctuated by constant explosions in the minefields. “Hold hands. Good.” I pointed to two of my closest girls. “You and you, get them down the ladder now.”

One by one the children passed me on their way to the floor hatch, all of them tightly gripping the hands of their friends. I don’t know what came over me. When Phillip moved by I grabbed him and held the child against my armor, then unlocked my helmet so I could whisper in his ear. He smelled like kids’ shampoo, and the thought of my son nearly made me scream.

“It’s OK, Phillip, we’ll make it. I’ll take care of you, you won’t get hurt.”

“Grandmother?” One of the girls waited next to the hatch and by the time I looked up all of the other children had already gone, the other Legionnaire leading the way down. She called out every few seconds, “Nobody look down, move slowly, hand over hand. That’s it!”

“What?” I asked.

The girl pointed at Phillip. “He needs to go too, Grandmother.”

I kissed his head and handed him to her before snapping my helmet back on, but it nearly killed me. None of them deserved this. And here I was again, helpless to change a course of events that would soon annihilate children I was supposed to protect. But once Phillip had left it brought back reality, and instead of spiraling downward into panic and fear I felt a sense of determination take over. Not this time.

Lucy was nearly apoplectic from waiting. “Goddamn it Grandmother!”

“What’s the problem?”

She didn’t have to tell me. As soon as I knelt and peered through a firing port it was clear that the mantes had crossed the minefield. Image amplification made the scene surreal, as if, rather than actually experiencing the attack, we watched it in some kind of three-dimensional holo as the creatures scrambled over the piles of their own dead, one of them every once in a while touching off an un-detonated mine. There were too many to count. The empty space between the bunker and the minefield had already filled with the things and as far as I could see there was nothing but mantes.

I clicked onto the general frequency. “Short bursts, aim for the center sections not the legs. Open fire.”

“It’s easier than the corporal’s small unit tactics sessions, Grandmother,” said Lucy. She laughed. Her grenade launcher cracked loudly and punched into her shoulder to cut the laughter short.

“Oh yeah? Why is that?” I asked.

“Because.” She dropped an empty clip and loaded another before raising the launcher to aim again. “The damn targets are closer, and there are so many that you can’t miss.”

Extended small unit tactics meant that we now spent almost all our time in the field. Marching. Hand-to-hand. And the Legion’s favorite pastime, solutions that involved fifty-kilometer marches followed by an assault up the side of an ubersteep mountain in two g’s. Fun.

The corporal had combined our platoon with three others, then divided the resulting company into two sections: an infantry section, and a heavy-weapons one that was smaller, but that packed a punch in terms of crew-served auto-Maxwells, mortars, and antiarmor rockets. He put me in charge of the heavy weapons section, and a Frenchwoman—“Buttons” because her nose had been squashed so that it looked round and flat—in charge of the rest. I hadn’t even really gotten a chance to know her before a civil war broke out.

Ever try marching thirty klicks over broken terrain in less than a day and then digging defensive fortifications? In two g’s at age thirty-five? It felt like a twisted form of anesthesia so that I knew my body was in agony but the pain was great enough to overload the nervous system, made it so I didn’t sense anything. There’s not much to care about at that point. Training kicks in and you do things automatically because the part of your brain that’s responsible for rational thought doesn’t work anymore, only the parts that you can’t control. Breathing. Circulation. And one last thing that all these weeks had burned into our nervous systems: rote memorization of military procedures. I had just finished digging my hole with the enthusiasm of a sleepwalker, and was about to make the rounds, when Buttons grabbed my arm and led me from the perimeter.

“What’s wrong?”

“Christ,” she said, “your French is awful. You sound like a retarded donkey. Trust me, just walk.”

So I did. But before we crested a ridgeline and lost sight of our position, I glanced back and saw what I had feared all along: a group of Chinese girls from the new section had faced off against my Russians, and everyone else was circled around them, watching.

“Oh shit.”

Jennifer’s voice clicked into my headset. “Marianne, you gotta stop this, it’s bad.”

“Turn off your receiver,” said Buttons.

“Why? We’ve got to go back and stop it, she’s right.”

Buttons grabbed my arm and fingered the forearm controls, silencing Jennifer. “Your friend is wrong. Trust me.”

There’s a strange thing about the Legion, and it was something you learned quickly if you were going to make it: a sense of whom to trust, whom to listen to, and who was worth following. Your survival depended on it. Buttons had that “follow-able” quality, and you heard it in her voice, saw it in the surety of her actions. So I went with her.

“What is going on?”

She sighed and, once we lost sight of the perimeter, sat on the ground, popping off her helmet. “I’m not allowed to come home anymore, I’ve shamed my family.”

“What are you talking about?”

“My father was Russian and a Legion captain, which is as high as you can go if you’re not French. He met my mother on leave one year and nine months later I was born. I’ve grown up in all this. He fought the idea of admitting women into its ranks, and when he learned of my enlistment disowned me.”

“Why are you telling me that, it doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on.”

“The point is…” Buttons pulled out a cigarette and handed it to me before lighting her own. “I know the Legion, and you should know—understand—that this is the way things are handled.”

“By letting them kill each other.”

“If it comes to that, yes. Fucking think. We’re about to be shipped to some shit-hole if and when we get out of here, and there won’t be anyone to help us if things go badly. What are you going to do? Call for reinforcements? Then what? Wait six months for a cleanup crew to wormhole its way into your system just in time to scoop up all the dead? They send us to the worst assignments imaginable—to die, not win—because it’s easier to send foreigners than real French. So the Legion isn’t an army, it’s a family, and we’re all sisters whether we like it or not. Sometimes families fight, even kill each other. In the end, it’s this process that weeds out the ones who don’t belong, the ones who are too sick, too crazy, too soft, too useless. If we go back there and stop this, nothing gets resolved, it’s like treating the symptoms of cancer without cutting out the tumor. If we let them settle it, once and for all, the problem is solved.”

She took a long drag then, and I noticed the view with a shiver. In front of us stretched the panorama of Nimes’s lush side, a section of the planet that for whatever reason responded to the rains with a bizarre form of life. Increased gravity meant that its trees didn’t grow as high as they did on Earth, but Nimes’s vegetation made up for it by growing sideways, sending down roots at regular intervals to support the branches, which otherwise would have sagged. If you squinted the plains resembled a never-ending field of green lichen, leaving you with simultaneous feelings of awe—that you saw something most on Earth hadn’t even seen in pictures—and of isolation. The planet wanted us dead. Somewhere out there walked the ghosts of my husband and children, wandering in the alien bushes, and the wind gusted over the ridgeline behind us. It hit me like a lightning bolt: that’s why they chose Nimes, because it was so…creepy.

But we were beginning to belong there. I mean, when I stepped back and took a look at how we had started and how we had transformed, it was clear we weren’t human anymore and it fit with what Buttons had said. The Legion didn’t want people. It wanted orphans that it could reshape into a family of psychopaths, and because they took their orphans from every culture in the world the Legion needed someplace to put them—someplace none of them could call home. A level playing field. Spend enough time on a planet where nobody belongs except the Legion, and soon everyone belongs to the Legion.

They had a plan for everything.

“What a crap-hole,” said Buttons. We sat in silence for an hour before she finally stood, helping me to my feet. “I think that’s long enough. We should head back.”

When we returned to the perimeter my jaw dropped. The fight had ended but at first I thought the girls were still yelling at each other until I got closer and realized they weren’t yelling at all. They were singing. The corporal had taught us traditional French songs, the kind that dripped with significance even though you’d be hard-pressed to identify any of the places mentioned. If you listened closely you heard the sadness in them, a kind of depression that existed only in someone who had seen the depths of hell and clawed his way out. At first we wondered why we sang them. It’s not like they uplifted. But after a while we got used to it, and then, as the agony of daily training and the hardships of Nimes sunk in, we got a sense of maybe-I-understand-these-words-after-all, and they stirred something, sometimes bringing us to tears.

The girls were on their way to getting drunk. None of them wore helmets and when Toly smiled I noticed that she had lost a tooth. A Chinese girl sat next to her; in the twilight it was hard to tell at first, but it looked as if her left eye had swollen shut.

“Want a drink, Grandmother?” Toly asked.

“No thanks.” I smelled the alcohol from two feet away, and whatever it was, it smelled strong. The Chinese girl grabbed Toly’s bottle and laughed.

“You settle everything with our new friends?”

“Who? With the Chinese? These aren’t Chinese, Grandmother, they’re our long-lost Legion sisters, Uighurs and Tibetans, reforged. Didn’t the corporal tell you? We’re all reforged. We’re French now, every one.”

I found Jennifer just before going to sleep. She was drunk too, already passed out with a huge smile on her face.

When night fell one of them shrieked again, and the slope surrounding the bunker went quiet.

“Anyone hurt?” I asked.

Lucy popped her helmet and grinned. “No, Grandmother. But we’re all low on ammunition. Thank God they like to take breaks.”

“Tell that to the colonists.”

I peered out the firing port. Walls of dead mantes had gathered around the bunker so that their legs interlocked with one another, giving us our first close-up view. The main similarity they shared with praying mantises were the forelegs, which folded when they stood. Everything else was a little different. A hard carapace made up their skin, which was a dull gray that in the fading sun reminded me of mist. And there were definitely no eyes. They didn’t have sectional bodies like real mantises, and instead the main trunk consisted of a roughly four-meter-long cylinder that ended in a globular head and maw, around which four sharp mandibles snapped together, forcing in food. Some of them still twitched. At first the girls would shoot at them, to get the twitching to stop, but I told them to knock it off; it was a waste of ammunition.

For a moment it felt good. Most of us had popped helmets to eat for the first time in two days, and I didn’t have to remind them that some needed to remain on watch since we had lost the sentry bots. Then Lucy tapped me on the shoulder.

“Makes you wonder,” she said, pointing at the piled corpses.

“Wonder what?”

“How many of them are there? I mean we must have killed thousands by now, and I haven’t seen any signs of them slowing. Maybe they sent out a call, to wake up nests all over the planet.”

I popped my helmet and sighed. “You’re awful, Lucy.”

“Hey, Grandmother, I’m just thinking out loud. On the other hand, maybe they’ve given up now and we won’t see them again. The problem is that if we do see them, we no longer have an acceptable field of fire.”

And just like that my good mood evaporated. She was right. The walls of dead were too high to see over, and the next time they attacked the mantes would get almost to the bunker before taking hits.

“I need ten volunteers,” I said, and everyone stopped talking.

“For what?” someone asked.

“To go out there and clear the bodies, give us some breathing room.”

Nobody raised her hand. In the end I picked them randomly and was about to volunteer myself when Lucy shook her head.

“No way, Grandmother, we need you here.”

The others left reluctantly through the roof hatch and I positioned two of our auto-Maxwells on top of the bunker to cover them just in case. It was slow going. By midnight they had pushed the wall back ten meters, but it was a monumental effort involving chainsaws so that the girls could hack the bodies into manageable chunks. I began to feel sick when someone pointed out that if you turned off light amplification the girls were half red, dripping blood from the waist down.

The next attack was a surprise. One of the girls had climbed on top of the pile so that the others could hand her body parts, when she disappeared with a scream. Then the wall erupted. Some mantes must have been pretending to be dead and once my team got close enough the things leaped into action, dragging the girls away without a fight.

I ordered everyone back inside.

“All ten lost, Grandmother,” said Lucy.

I didn’t know what to say. For the first time I felt a despair so overwhelming that I considered handing the command over and going below, to crawl into one of the beds—just curl up and wait for the inevitable. Before I actually did it, though, Lucy grabbed my arm.

“Here they come.” She laughed then, before locking her helmet back on. “Makes me wish I had been a miner.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because for the miners it’s already over, and they have nothing left to worry about.”

The mining area was wasted. French corporates had scoured this section of Nimes clear of vegetation for at least ten kilometers, and toward the end of our march we were strung out on hundred-meter-high berms that separated huge pits filled with a pale blue waste liquid—like poisoned swimming pools. A main entryway had been carved out of a low mountain. Its doors swung in a strong wind, and a pair of narrow-gauge rail lines disappeared into the mine’s darkness.

Every once in a while the realization of what was happening would pierce my cocoon of exhaustion, even make me smile a little: it was almost over. We had just completed a three-day march—barely—and once we finished our assault we’d be Legionnaires, complete with white kepis. This was our final exam.

The corporal called me and Buttons over and a map popped onto our heads-up displays. “Give me your plan.”

“Heavy weapons won’t be helpful inside,” said Buttons. “So Grandmother will set her girls to cover all the exits, and my people will sweep the interior levels, one at a time, moving by fire teams.”

I marked the map using forearm controls and listed the personnel I’d assign to each spot while the corporal waited. When I finished he shouldered his Maxwell carbine, motioning to Buttons.

“Take us in.”

I was nervous. My groups moved to their assigned locations and there shouldn’t have been anything to worry about, it was just another training exercise—our last. But it wasn’t. The excitement of completing basic evaporated, replaced by a sense that something was off, like maybe we had always been cursed and only now would it hit. Jennifer moved her team atop one of the waste-containment berms overlooking the main entrance. She stumbled up the slope. It took them longer than the others to set up their auto-Maxwell, and while I scrambled up to join them I couldn’t shake the feeling that things were about to go wrong.

Once the teams had settled into their positions, I passed the word to activate chameleon skins. Our suits functioned the same way real combat ones did, so had been coated with a polymer that, when activated, mimicked the wearers’ immediate surroundings. By now I should have been used to it. But when one by one my people disappeared, their suits masking all thermal emissions and the skins making them completely invisible, I felt alone. Only blinking dots on my map said otherwise.

“Positions set,” I announced, and the lights blinked from red to green.

Then we waited. Winds picked up so that whenever a gust blew across the mine entrance it howled, and at first I heard the sounds of Buttons and her teams as they moved their way deeper into the mountain. A second later we lost them in mid-transmission.

“Shit,” I muttered.

Jennifer stirred next to me but all I saw was a patch of shimmering air. “What’s wrong?”

“Relays. We forgot the relays.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Negative. Send your—”

Before I finished, a craft appeared on the horizon, and our perimeter warning alarms tripped, piercing my eardrums with a loud beeping until I cut them off. The alarm meant that whoever was coming, they weren’t supposed to even be on the planet.

“Anyone see who that is?” I asked, and one after another the girls radioed in that they couldn’t tell. A second craft appeared then, larger than the first, and as soon as I saw it—a huge ore transporter, almost two hundred meters long, that settled with a boom near the main entrance—I knew things had just gotten worse. Toly confirmed it.

“Raiders.” Her voice over the radio startled me.

“What?” I asked.

“Raiders, Grandmother—they’ve come to scavenge for equipment, ore, whatever they can get their hands on. Might be Chinese, you can’t tell from the ship but trust me, I know. I used to be one. This is bad. They’ll kill rather than be taken.”

Unease turned into fear, which then shifted into terror. Everything moved in slow motion, and when the transport’s loading ramp lowered to release a gang of men I thought they looked strange; I almost didn’t recognize them as human. All of them had a dirty appearance, unshaven, and I had spent so much time in the Legion now that their bearing screamed disorganization—telegraphed a lack of discipline. But none of that helped. Toly’s announcement had sent a shock through me, and sweat covered my palms, making the insides of my gauntlets feel slick and uncertain. This was the real deal, and despite the fact that we had spent the last two months training for exactly this—combat—my mind turned into concrete. A wrong decision would kill everyone.

“Grandmother?” Toly asked. “What do you want us to do?”

Half the men were armed, some with Maxwell carbines, others with grenade launchers, and they took up defensive positions as the rest offloaded equipment. There was no way to get into the mine now, no way to move in and relay communications with the rest of our unit, with the corporal. Buttons was cut off.

“Grandmother? Goddamn it!”

Toly’s anger made something click. I had begun to shake and my breathing had gotten so loud that it was all I heard until a calmness swept over me, melting the sensation of horror and paralysis. I recalled the hundreds of times we had trained for contact, mentally ticked through the checklist, and repeated the words over the radio.

“Maxwells at full power, safeties off.”

I checked my map. The other ship was out there, but it was obvious we hadn’t been spotted. Most of my girls held positions at the mine’s secondary entrances, far from the main one, and would be of no use unless I got them closer.

“Teams one through four, move to new positions.” I marked spots on the map that would surround our visitors, and sent the updated tactical plot.

It all happened slowly. The green dots turned red again and crept over my heads-up display, and I heard the men’s voices as they relaxed and began talking. The terror almost returned. Waiting for my girls to move left plenty of time to convince myself that our visitors would notice us and open fire, and I began to think we should run.

The dots finally turned green, and Toly clicked back in. “We’re ready, Grandmother.”

“Open fire.” It didn’t even sound like me when I said it.

The auto-Maxwells functioned on the same principle as our carbines. A ceramic-encased alloy barrel wrapped in a series of electromagnets propelled a stream of flechettes down its barrel at high enough velocities that the projectiles cracked when they broke the sound barrier. But with the auto-cannons the flechettes were huge. And every other round was a high-explosive armor-piercing one, which, as I watched, tore the men apart. One man disintegrated as he sprinted for the ship’s ramp. Another screamed just before his head popped from his shoulders and rolled along the ground to stop against the mine railway, a grimace frozen on his face.

When our rockets slammed into the ship’s sides I realized I had forgotten something, and radioed back to base that we had made contact with an unknown enemy.

“Is this a training exercise?” a voice asked.

“No it’s not a damn exercise,” I shouted and then ended the discussion. Who cared what they did with the information? Our base was too far for them to offer rapid assistance anyway.

We had begun to get the upper hand when the ship overhead roared in. Things happened so quickly that it was hard to focus on any one event, the chaos making me chew the inside of my cheek until it bled. Then one of my green lights blinked out at the same time that I saw an explosion, and the ship banked away to turn for a second pass, to target another of our positions. Jennifer’s auto-cannon zipped loudly nearby, and it looked as though the ship had zeroed in on the firing signature so that when the craft grew larger in my faceplate I buried my head in the dirt, hoping that I would sink into the ground, willing myself to become smaller.

Nothing happened. I looked up to see the ship wheeling silently, end over end, before it slammed into one of the waste ponds along with two rockets that chased it.

“Grandmother,” said Toly, “we need Buttons.”

I ran. I couldn’t even see anything except tracer flechettes as they cut the air, sounding like angry hornets if they got close enough. By now the men had organized a defense and there were more of them, their volume of fire getting heavier. It didn’t matter that we were invisible. Our flechettes and rockets traced back to the weapons, and another of our positions went silent when one of the men fired a salvo of grenades that landed dead on. Before I knew that I had even made it I was inside the mine entrance, my vision kit shifting to light amplification.

At first I heard only static. But once far enough inside I got through to the corporal and told him what was happening. The air grew heavy then, and my vision blurred so that I had trouble deciphering the damage report on my heads-up: three hits on my left leg. Funny, I thought, just before passing out, I never even felt them hit.

The battle ended almost as soon as it had begun. We held the first wave of mantes using a heavy volume of fire, but soon we had to limit our shots to short bursts, then singles when the ammunition had all but run out. One of the girls screamed. A mante had jammed its foreleg through a firing port, skewered her through the chest, and was trying to pull her outside where it would tear her to pieces. Lucy yanked out her combat knife and chopped its leg off, too late. The girl died before we got her below.

“Retreat,” I ordered, and punched the command into the net just in case my voice didn’t carry.

I wanted to go first. The urge to dive through the floor hatch nearly overcame me, so that I had to force myself to stand still as the girls disappeared through the hole. All around, mantes shoved their forearms through the ports, doing their best to get at me, and I noticed that with each push their claws dislodged concrete. What were those things made of? Whatever it was the stuff was strong enough that eventually they’d break through and I already heard them working at the roof hatch, slamming their claws on the steel. Finally it was my turn and I closed the floor hatch behind me, so that the sounds became muffled.

Heidi waited for me at the bottom of the ladder. “You want the good news or the bad?” she asked.

“Dammit, Heidi…”

“Fine, fine. The good news is that I finally got through and made contact with orbital. They’re sending an attack ship down, and it should arrive in twelve hours.”

The girls closest to us popped their helmets and grinned, hugging each other at the news. I didn’t feel so happy; it wasn’t clear that we would last twelve hours.

“The bad news?”

Heidi frowned. “We just lost the communications tower.”

“So now all we can do is stay alive.” I left and found Lucy on the other side of the chamber. “Move everyone down to the lower level, kids first. I want a four-man team positioned up here so they can fire on anything that tries to come down here from the bunker. Give them all remaining ammunition.”

Lucy passed on the order and then looked at me. “What will we use if they get us in the lower level?”

“Knives.”

Eight hours later we heard the mantes in the bunker above. I had stayed behind with the fire team and we sealed our helmets again, never taking our eyes off the tiny hatch a hundred meters overhead. The mantes pounded on it, sending bits of concrete to patter on the floor.

I wasn’t scared this time. On my orders Lucy had taken a Maxwell with a full hopper of flechettes, and if they broke through us she was to kill the children as quickly as possible—so they wouldn’t suffer. The rest of the girls would overdose on combat drugs. All I felt was a kind of happiness, that in a few hours either we would be saved or I’d have a reunion with my children and husband. It wasn’t a bad situation at all, I decided. Either way I won.

Three hours later the hatch slammed onto the floor next to us, and my team opened fire. Mantes fell down the ladder, their limbs clanking against the rungs, and collected inside the safety rings so that within ten minutes the ladder resembled a soda straw that had filled with gray crud. Then they got creative. The ones still at the top hacked at the steel rods connecting the ladder to the ceiling, the pinging noise so loud that it overloaded our audio pickups. My girls fired at them, carefully aiming at the exposed limbs. It didn’t matter. As soon as one was injured another took its place, and eventually the ladder groaned as it swung over in the huge chamber, smashing an entire row of bunk beds when it hit.

Mantes rained down from the ceiling. The fall injured most of them but one clambered over the wreckage and directly toward me. I fired my carbine on full auto, watching as the tracers cut into its head, punching through to the other side.

“Fall back!” I shouted, just before being knocked off my feet.

One of the things shrieked from above. At first I thought it was the signal for them to continue their attack, but no more dropped from the ceiling hatch and when a muffled blast sent chunks of concrete to the floor I realized what had caused me to fall. Bombardment. The attack ship had arrived, early, and was bombing the ground above us, clearing the topside of mantes. My girls stood as best they could amid the tremors, and moved through the remaining creatures, finishing off any that had made it down, and a few minutes later it ended. We were safe.

The shouts of joy from my helmet speakers made it hard to concentrate.

“Great,” I said, to no one in particular. “There’s only one problem.”

“What’s that, Grandmother?” Lucy had sneaked up from below, and one by one the others joined us.

I pointed to the crumpled ladder. “How do we get out?”

“Grandmother, I’m sure they’ll figure it out. But right now there’s a little boy down there who keeps asking to see you.”

I ran to the floor hatch, screaming for the girls to make a path, and all I thought of was that for the children it was just beginning, that living might be more difficult than dying. They’d be all alone now.

The corporal stood alone on the parade ground, his uniform gone and replaced by a dirty-white set of pajamas. Colonel Jordi, the base commander, read aloud from the podium.

“A casualty report from the 108th Training Battalion, resulting from enemy action at Nimes mining station twelve, on June twelfth, 2497, Earth calendar. Twenty volunteers from the heavy weapons section. Shinja Nikito, heavy weapons specialist, died of enemy fire. Francine Fillipovich, heavy weapons specialist, died of enemy fire…” As the colonel read through all the names I felt my knees begin to buckle. The doctors had allowed me to stand with my unit, but my leg injuries hadn’t yet healed and I leaned forward on a pair of crutches. He read Jennifer’s name. Cause of death? Drowning. I hadn’t noticed during the battle because of the chaos and terror, but even before the action had started Jennifer got scared and decided to run, making it about fifty meters before the berm collapsed beneath her. She rolled into one of the waste pools and eventually suffocated.

By the time he finished reading the names tears were streaming down my face.

“Corporal Fedorov, I accuse you of gross negligence and failure to carry out your duties in combat, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of Legionnaire volunteers. Do you dispute this charge?”

Wind whistled over the girls’ armor, and dust got in my eyes, making it hard to see. At first the corporal didn’t say anything. Then he looked up and met the colonel’s stare.

“No, Colonel.”

“Fine.” He tucked the digital pad into a pouch at his side and clasped both hands behind his back. The colonel’s kepi was jet-black. Its color fixed my attention because it looked as though the material soaked up the very light, a black hole so strong that it dimmed the air around us in an attempt to suck the life from Nimes itself. “You deserve death. But since your record speaks for itself, a lifetime of exemplary service, it is my decision that you shall serve four weeks of corporal punishment, followed by expulsion from the Legion and loss of all privileges. Dismissed.”

Two military police grabbed the corporal’s arms to lead him away and for the first time I saw that his ankles had been shackled. I was about to leave when I noticed my unit. Toly popped her helmet and walked closer, the rest of her friends following.

“You froze out there, Grandmother.”

“I know.”

“You could’ve killed us.” She spat on the ground and my skin went cold. Toly didn’t have to tell me what I had done. After I came to in the infirmary it only took a day to convince myself that Jennifer was my fault, that I should have seen her cowardice and alerted the corporal. From there it was an easy step, no leap at all. They were all my fault.

I started crying and she slapped me. “Cut that shit out, you wanted the Legion and now you’ve got it.”

“I killed them. It was all because of me.”

A group of girls arranged themselves between us and the camp so that others couldn’t see what was happening, and the chill became a horrifying thought: they were angry enough to murder.

“It was all because of me,” Toly repeated, mocking. Her fist slammed into my gut, knocking the crutches away so that I collapsed in the dust, the wind knocked out. “Francine is dead. Not because you froze, because you forgot to set up relays.” Her boot smashed into the side of my face then and I nearly blacked out. “That was for Francine.”

The other Russians followed. One after another they took turns beating and kicking me, their curses interlaced with spitting so that by the end of it I was covered with mud and dust, blood streaming from my mouth.

The others left and Buttons knelt by my face. “They’re wrong, it’s not your fault, but you needed this lesson.”

“What?” The tears wouldn’t stop. Being beaten didn’t bother me, if anything it helped because it felt like I had paid at least some price for what I had done. If I’d learned nothing else during my experience at the mine, I had learned one thing: I was part coward too, like Jennifer. What Toly and the others had done was how the Legion took care of cowards, and in a way the process served as a kind of absolution, a bless-me-for-I-have-sinned kind of thing where their beatings took the place of Hail Marys and Our Fathers. I was half crying from relief.

“I said it’s not your fault, none of us expected combat so soon and what happened to you could have happened to anyone. Yeah, you forgot the relays. But so did everyone else, we were exhausted, had no business being that far out. Yeah, you froze. But then you got moving and made the right calls. You screwed up, took your punishment, and now we forgive you, but this is what will happen next. When you return to the unit, you’ll have already lost control of the heavy weapons section to Toly. We have a new corporal and it’s already been arranged. Then you do as you’re told and all will be forgotten. You’re back in the family now, Grandmother, this is just another lesson. Got it?”

I nodded and Buttons helped me to my feet, handing me my crutches. When I made it to my bunk a nurse saw the new injuries and called the doctor, but luckily I passed out before they asked how I got them. In the end nothing else happened. Two weeks later we found ourselves in a transport bound for Lavigne, a kepi blanc perched atop my head. It felt awkward—as if I didn’t really deserve the cap or the title of Legionnaire. For the briefest moment I thought about those mistakes again, thought maybe I wasn’t the best, maybe I had screwed up and was more than part coward, and a glare from Toly underscored my doubt, bringing back the corporal’s first words.

They had made a terrible mistake in admitting me; I didn’t belong.

The children were loaded onto the attack ship first, then my girls, and then me. Buttons hugged me as we lifted off.

“Well done. We have a science team doing flyovers now, apparently the mantes hibernate deep underground for a hundred-year cycle, and the colonists’ first mine shaft hit one of their nests, waking them. But now they know what to look for. We’ll wipe them out and come back.”

“You’re crying.”

She brushed a tear from her cheek and then laughed. “I should have been there, I’m sorry. But you should see the lieutenant, I think he’ll need a psychiatrist he’s so upset about leaving all of you alone. If there’s anything you want or need, ask him now before he gets over it.”

“There’s a boy among them, Buttons, his name is Phillip. I was wondering…”

“The answer is no, Grandmother. You can’t have kids in the Legion.” She must have seen the look on my face because she hugged me. “And besides, his mother and father are alive. Lucy told me about him and I looked it up. He was here with his aunt and uncle because his parents thought that time on a colony would be good for him. I think they’d fight you for custody.”

I laughed at that and then noticed her staring. “What?”

“I don’t know if this is the right time.”

“Spit it out!”

Buttons looked away and punched something on her forearm computer so that a few seconds later my incoming message light blinked. She explained while I read.

“Command wants two of us to go to officers’ school. Me. The other would have been Toly but she’s gone, and after seeing your performance planet-side they thought it would be best to pass the offer to you.”

“An officer?”

“Well, remember, you’re not French. The highest you’d go is captain. Also, one more thing: regulations have changed since we joined. If you accept a commission, it’s a lifelong assignment and you wouldn’t be able to leave for twenty years. We’re at war now, Grandmother, on Koryo.”

And I thought. They all came back to me then, including my husband and children. What would they think? I’d lost Jennifer, countless others I hadn’t even known on Nimes, and even the corporal had been a loss, my failure to perform partly responsible for it. Then there was Toly. I tried to stop her but even though her own stupidity took her out, a voice told me that I should have done more, tried harder. A parade of doubt marched through my head, with a hundred phantoms telling me that I’d screw up like I always had, command wasn’t meant for someone like me and more people would die because of my incompetence.

But that was all crap.

Who other than Buttons had it wired straight? None of us belonged and we were all misfits, ex-hookers and thieves or losers to the core, and so the last bit of Legion logic settled into place and left me with the sensation of having had an epiphany: we did belong—to each other. Since my family had died, my entire life had been one long stretch of depression, an existence without any sense of being useful to anyone or for anything.

Until now.

“Sure. I’ll do it.”

Buttons hugged me one more time. “Welcome home, I’m glad you made it out.”

“Me too,” I said. “You told me on Nimes, the Legion is a family. Well, families need to stick together, and besides…” I ignored the shipboard rules and pulled a cigarette from Buttons’s pack, waiting for her to light it. The first drag felt good. “What would these girls do without their grandmother?”